My People

I have a people, a tribe, a family.
They stay.
They comfort.
They sit.
They listen.
They give.
They love.
They stand.
They speak......
Truth
Peace
Joy
Wisdom.
They are the ones on whom I know I can depend.
They are the ones who have stood the test of......
Time
Grief
Joy
Transition
Anger
Confusion.
At my worst, they are the best.
They are my people and I am theirs.

The Devil Can Go To Hell

The scream bubbled up from within, originating from my toes, from the empty aching place in my chest, shook my body and the filled the car.  The car that I had been driving in for over 6 hours, had left my house in early that morning, and now was in as it was bringing me to the funeral that I was in the process of missing.  Whether by a hair, or the skin of my teeth, or by mere miscommunication I was missing it.  The damn broke and out flowed all of it.....  The sadness, the rage, the hopelessness, the longing to understand why?  Why?  WHY!!!!!!!!  7 years, 5 deaths of note, all too young, all too soon, all so loved, all family.....  It felt as if I was buffeted on every side, so many things taken in the last few years, with no explanation.  Just the dull ache of something lost, someone lost....... Senseless...... God and I have become intimate sparing partners, and so I readied myself to plunge in, to grapple, to sink my face into Gods chest, wetting it with tears, beating it with my fists.  I knew God could hold me, so I screamed, and screamed, and ran my voice ragged.  Readying myself for the fight, the questions, the reestablishing of trust.....  But as the last remnants echoed from my throat, as the air became still,as my body trembled, and the hot tears flowed, the emotion changed.  WAR.  I was at war.......  Analogies of war have always deeply troubled my inner child, the idea of celebrating and validating mass death due to a political ideology chills me.  We drop bombs on brown skinned people like they don't matter, many of them our brothers and sisters in Christ, sacrificed to the idol of  nationalism.  It is something that I will never support, and yet I was at War....  Like coming out of a fog I saw the enemy for who he was.  He comes to steal, kill and destroy.  Anything...  Anyone....  Indiscriminately.......  Savagely........  With lies and corruption, with depression and suicide, with sickness and sin, he comes to take away anything good and beautiful.  And if you are good and beautiful he will try to cut off all that you hold dear, to turn you away from your only hope.  Abusive and manipulative, he strips you of those you love, and plants the insidious question of Why?  Why would God?  Where?  Where was God?  How?  How can God?  Cutting down all you love and then manipulating you to blame your only hope of his defeat.  I will no longer take part in this abusive, manipulative relationship!  I so I readied myself for War.....  Come at me and I speak Jesus.  Attack me and I will praise my Lord.  Hurt me and I will cry out to my God.  Every attempt you make to separate me from the Great I Am will only plunge me deeper into in his presence.  Kill me, and I will be with my Savior.  Kill me, and my funeral will sing the praises of the most high God.  You can do nothing to me, my salvation is secure, Jesus's name will always be on my lips.  I will invite him into every place, bring him into every dingy bar, every shot of whiskey, every dysfunctional family gathering, every dimly lit place, the light will shine,  Come at me devil, I dare you!  Every strike you take at the ones I love will be met with the battle cry of  Jesus.  Your time is short, your sentence pronounced.  And as far as I am concerned......  The devil can go to hell.

Finite

Things are broken

We are broken

Celebrating life and mourning death

We are never prepared

All die, and yet......

Yet war against it

As if something tells us it has all gone wrong

Eden lost

Far reaching consequences of personal choice

We thought we knew

We wanted to know

It was humanities undoing

Seeking what was not ours

Taking what was not meant for us

Finite understanding

Finite lives

So now we mourn

But not for long

We are finite

But there is infinity to be found

if only.......

We would step down from the throne

You get what you get...

I found a new wrinkle the other day, it just magically appeared one morning and decided to stick around.  I would like to say that I welcomed the new friend, that I welcome this new me.....  But I find a war of ideal vs real playing out.  Surely I am not that....  That vain, that weak, that old, that conceited, that fat, that saggy, that woman grasping at what has already slipped away.  Down and out the back door, secretly, quietly, till one morning what you see is what you get.  You get what you get and you don't throw a fit......

Mundane

Beauty in the mundane..... How?  Why?  I am much more drawn to things of the romantic persuasion.  Give me life, give me death, just don't give me somewhere in between.  But life is found in the moments of in betweens.  Time has passed as has life, moments come and gone.  If I am not careful life will pass me by as I wait for moments of grandeur.  Romance being the cocaine of life, the upper, just one more hit, oh to feel so alive.  Coming down being so much harder, life being so much less.  But the air is thin when you are high, rich when you are low.  Weighty, dense, complex........ I will take richness over high airs any day.